


Major Arcana

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Tarot (Divination Cards)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-25 00:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3790543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every life is a facet of truth. </p><p>ASOIAF characters as tarot trumps in 100 words each.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I The Magician

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the trumps in the Tarot of Marseilles. I interpreted some cards more loosely than others, aided by _Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot_ by Rachel Pollack. I own nothing.

Fools bend easily. Proud men, vain men, rich men – all easy, all the same. 

Tyrion has always had a knack for getting men to dance to his tune, caper as they expected a dwarf to caper for them. His mistake lay in failing to notice anything more than the sharpness of his mind and tongue lent him strength. In the absence of power and riches, he discovers a gift for survival. A meal of ambition washed down with rage. 

Tired of playing with shadows, stripped of his name and purse, under Meereen’s motley walls, Tyrion Lannister reaches for the sun.


	2. II The High Priestess

It’s harder than it looks. Everything is harder since her family was stripped from her like garments shed by a penitent. 

Catelyn maintains an air of calm, authority, sage advice for her only remaining son, when she would rather scream, rend her clothes, and run mad through rain-lashed trees.

She does not have the luxury of grief. Cat, her father’s, her husband’s little Cat must keep her claws tucked in, her howls tamped down in her throat. They tear at her from within. If a statue of the Mother split open, there would be leaping fire in its stone breast.


	3. III The Empress

A foreign crown and a quicksand throne have taught Daenerys that being soft and kind is a queen’s hardest task. 

She has had children hatched and unborn and freed, husbands and lovers chosen by her and for her. Once she had a brother and friends. Dany has had to be something, everything, the world to them all. 

In the tangerine-scented dark woven through with faint voices from far below, Daenerys longs to be wanted for herself, feared and respected for herself, secure in herself. Known, mysterious, yet impossible to misinterpret. A multitude as well as alone. In and of herself.


	4. IV The Emperor

In his father’s hall, amidst the drunken screeching of whores and the bugling approbation of sycophants, his boyhood dreams of valor punctuated by creditors howling outside the gates, Tywin Lannister learned what it means to be a man.

A man does not let himself be guided by his belly, his manhood, or his heart. No attribute which can be easily crushed to a bloody pulp. 

A man uses reason and willpower. Qualities honed and kept sharp through frequent use. Mercy, kindness, love will kill one as surely as any blade or sweet poison.

Tywin never expected to die sitting down.


	5. V The Hierophant

Books are safer than living. In books, no death is ever permanent, no injury painful, no anguish impossible to undo. One need only turn the page for the sun to shine, and dragons to roll over and allow themselves to be petted like dogs.

This is what Samwell Tarly learned in his father’s hall, at his mother’s side. Hiding behind her skirts, his father said. 

Sam never expected to travel, he never wanted adventures outside of books. If he could change the seasons and go on quests by wishing and thinking alone, Sam himself would be the stuff of song.


	6. VI The Lovers

Balance. Faith and knowledge. Feeling and want. God’s love, human love.

Melisandre does not lack fervor. A cold fish would make a queer servant for the Lord of Light. She is kindled from within, those of weaker conviction take solace in her presence. She is unto them a shining lamp, a warm hearth, a promise of spring sunshine in the cold dark. 

So what if her fervor stems from desire rather than certainty, more hope than true belief? Fire is not stone, it cannot stand still and never waver.

Melisandre hopes for divine certainty. Her lot is flesh and shadow.


	7. VII The Chariot

A bastard’s lot in life is never success or recognition or glory. This was Jon Snow’s lullaby in the corners of his father’s hall. Or so he remembers it, memory stiffened and shattered by winds at the Wall.

Bastards have commanded the Night’s Watch, the Kingsguard. Some have even lived to bear their fathers’ true names. 

Jon picks his loyalties, his battles, his friends. Yet he cannot seem to chart a true course. A ship tossed on wintry seas, his grip on the rudder always slipping due to ice, fear or weakness. He feels a stranger’s bones under his face.


	8. VIII Justice

The trueborn daughter of Lord Stark and his lady wife has no armor except courtesy. Her kind heart is a flimsy shield, but it is better than nothing. 

No true knight comes to her aid, none but liars and singers and scarred brutes. What is left to her but to reward kindness with a smile and a wary glance, overtures of friendship with gentle calculation? Can she trust, can she, can she? The caged bird sings but the one song, always.

Warm, Sansa dreams of a snowy castle. In stone halls, drafts pull at her skirts, paw at her train.


	9. IX The Hermit

He should tell his queen the truth. He has become old without noticing, and a coward, it seems. He grew into his wandering greybeard’s sandals, now he cannot fumble a way back to himself. An old man, divested of his aged skin.

Barristan Selmy, Barristan the Bold, falters in the face of a child, a girl queen. She has her mother’s beauty and her father’s love of fire, but she could be a builder, a ruler the likes of which the Age of Heroes never knew.

One day he will tell her of her brother. The truth, a shared prison.


	10. X The Wheel of Fortune

Nothing ever just happens. A pebble sets mountains toppling, a whispered word brings down a Great House, a drop of liquid creates a child or ends its life. Secrets can be a net or a quarrel, flung out to gather the many or aimed to pierce the heart of the one.

Varys understands that wheels turn, but they never come back to quite the same place. When things change for the worse, taking a chance on the unknown is better than musing on possibilities. 

Neither getting ahead nor falling behind, Varys takes a step sideways, observes how the pattern alters.


	11. XI Strength

It comes from within. A soft heart, a thin skin are the spindles on which her strength is spun. Not her brawny arms – her soft maiden’s heart, her spine tempered like the finest steel.

Brienne doesn’t consider herself strong. She can break men like sheaves, she has fought off many a calamity and succumbed to a few, but she knows what she is. A maiden cannot be a knight. A maiden can only grapple with herself, force open the world’s maws, and try.

Her cheek hurts. She wants to go home. Brienne hunches and scowls, the road a spun thread.


	12. XII The Hanged Man

He used to think with his hands. If he could act, grapple, fight, he didn’t need to think.

Ser Jaime Lannister, the Lion of Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, brother to a queen and father to kings, feels as weighed down by titles as a donkey. His secrets never used to weigh as much, it seems. Under that weight, he is almost helpless sometimes, naked. He can use his wit well enough, but it makes for an odd weapon, like a pair of wings, a real sword in his phantom hand.

The winds would twist him. Jaime holds fast.


	13. XIII Death

They want her to forget, to loosen her grip on herself so they can strip her down to her bones, wiggling worms and melting flesh. Flesh which parts and closes like green water in the canals, hiding everything, containing nothing.

Arya Stark understands death, she is certain of that much. Vengeance is food: it fills her up, then leaves her wanting more. Always more, like life. Death is something else. 

Arya has had many names, can do without them all. So long as she keeps her bones, her Needle, and her wits about her.

You always have to keep something.


	14. XIV Temperance

Margaery Tyrell learned at her grandmother’s knee that a highborn maiden must be beautiful, wealthy, and fortunate in her relations. Above all, she must be clever. 

Beauty, riches, and good fortune are advantages, valuable cyvasse pieces. But without wit, she is playing on an empty board, against enemies armed with catapults and elephants, while she has only short, sharp thorns.

Margaery makes do. She accepts, she mollifies and cajoles. She wooed her first husband, flattered the second, now she plays games and wins favor with the third. Her head lies as safe on her pillow as a queen’s ever does.


	15. XV The Devil

Nobody told her it could be like this. They should have told her. She is the queen, it was someone’s duty to keep her appraised. 

Nobody told her power would keep slipping through her fingers, except in her fleeting dreams. She could command, but curs would avoid obeying her. Nobody mentioned her pleasure would not be as easy to grasp as her jewels, her role not quite as light to bear as Myrish lace. She tries to do what her beloved father, fat husband, dead son did. 

Cersei Lannister sits on the throne. She does not feel like a king.


	16. XVI The Tower

The world is so overpopulated by fools, Petyr sometimes has difficulty remembering they wouldn’t thank him for ridding its harried face of a few. Fools conspire in their own destruction willingly enough, but not in public.

He does not do it for the gold or the power, not really. Dragons, stags, stars, the comfort and safety and strength those buy are but means to an end. 

Petyr Baelish doesn’t bother to put a name to his goal. He knows what it is, or did – once it had a woman’s name, but she died – and words are deceptive, stone breaking underfoot.


	17. XVII The Star

Bran was named for his uncle Brandon, a strong man, and Bran the Builder, a wise man. 

Bran cannot use his legs, his head is a muddle of half-remembered frights, dreams, and promises. Those promises drove him forward long after reason and hope froze in their sleep, long after none of his stronger companions should have gone on. 

In this cave which is no cave, talking to a man who is a crow and more than a man, Bran cannot find his balance. He is sprawled, flung, shattered.

He will never walk. This he knew already. A new promise, shining.


	18. XVIII The Moon

In his brother’s tender care, Sandor wised up younger than most. Most men go to their graves complete fools, but Sandor learned about reality as early as he can remember or cares to.

The world is a vile pretense, a shadow play on the wall, thin veils in a doorway, beckoning to a gaping maw. Beyond it, the animal scrabbles to get out, howling, thirsty. Deeper still, the true fear, flickering.

Now he hears a voice speaking of calm, acceptance. A man’s voice, something in its timbre Sandor recognizes as not unlike his own.

Murmuring water, the moon. Sandor digs.


	19. XIX The Sun

Being called the Viper clears a path for him, rumor and truth entwined and writhing like sand adders in the sun. Every word, true or not yet come true, poisons his enemies’ wells as well as it sweetens Oberyn’s purpose.

He wakes every scorching day and goes to sleep every night knowing none would dare call him a man who had not lived. His grief as full-bodied as his pleasures, the deaths he wrought and the lives he made – precious pearls in his hand.

The sun shines bright on the day Oberyn Martell faces his sister’s murderer at long last.


	20. XX Judgment

The Lord of Winterfell, newly minted Hand of the King, cannot be seen to hesitate. Weakness is for the lowborn and babes at the breast. 

Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, must be made of stone, slow and thorough in thought, impossible to sway once he reaches a decision. His father and brother deserve no less. Their bones under Winterfell weigh heavy on Eddard’s sleep.

He dare not speak the truth he dreams: a second son, never meant to rule, perhaps ill-suited to it. Keeper of his people and their traditions. No crown of iron and bronze could weigh heavier.


	21. XXI The World

No living man could live up to such glory and admiration. Not even the blood of the dragon. 

In life, Rhaegar was a quiet man and bookish, more at ease with harp than sword. His father a madman, his mother atremble with pained dignity. The strength of his conviction and passion his best armor. 

In death and dreams of the wife he never wed, the sister he never knew, he is the perfect prince. In his murderer’s dreams, he is the slavering monster which will not die, swirling water tinged red around its claws.

Rhaegar Targaryen only did his best.


	22. The Fool

He’s lost everything: his name, his history, parts of himself more needful than a little skin, a little flesh. His way, his purpose, his honor. 

Will the sun rise for him, will blows rain down or eager licks and scraps from the kitchen? He huddles, lost in his hollow skull, a crouching, gibbering fool, only not amusing. Cannot dance, cannot sing or caper or jape. Might as well have lost his tongue as well. So his master’s father lets him stay and listen.

To be Reek is safer. But even a stone, a leaf, a fool merits a true name.


End file.
